Note: This falls under the “I don’t think this is supported” category – use this method at your own peril!

As part of some testing I’ve been doing for vRealize Automation DR scenarios, I wanted to test changing the IP address of a HA PSC pair using a script (think SRM failover to a new subnet).

What I didn’t want to do was simply edit the connections directly – quite often with the VMware appliances there are scripts on start-up to ensure the configuration is correct and consistent – what I wanted was to be able to find a more supported and reliable way.

Fortunately the VAMI scripts are deployed on most appliances and are included on the PSC. I was able to work out a process (mostly by trial and error!) of getting the IP change to stick.

# Update the network IP address (this is for IPv4, there are options for IPv6 too, and DHCP)
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network eth0 STATICV4 192.168.10.52 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1
# This updates the IP in /etc/hosts - requires the FQDN as an argument or sets it to localhost.localdomain
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_hostname vra.definit.local
# This makes the changes “stick” on reboot
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_ensure_network_configuration eth0
reboot

I successfully used the the Guest Script Manager package from the VMware Center of Excellence to store and execute the script via vRealize Orchestrator, as well as using a bash script actually on the host. This worked during my testing to modify both the IP addresses in a PSC HA Cluster, and allowed (with some DNS changes) the fail-over to a completely different subnet.